Two films featuring Eric Cantona, Looking For Eric and French Film, see the
enigmatic Frenchman fulfil the same function: representing hidden truths
denied to the rest of us.

“Ooh-ah! Cantona!” It’s been 12 years since that chant in salute of Eric Cantona, the hugely gifted French-born footballer and world-class enigma, has been heard around the nation’s Premiership grounds.

But it’s likely to be heard again next month at a very different setting - the Cannes Film Festival, where Cantona, now 41 and primarily an actor, appears in British director Ken Loach’s new film Looking For Eric, which will be competing for the Palme d’Or.

Cantona plays himself in a story about a Manchester postman, also named Eric, who is a devoted Manchester United fan. When things go wrong in Eric Bishop’s life, both in terms of his work and his love life, he decides to seek out his hero, Cantona, for some philosophical advice and life coaching.

Loach’s film opens in Britain on June 12, after being exhibited in Cannes. But while the festival is taking place in France, another movie featuring Cantona opens in this country. It’s called French Film - misleadingly so, because it’s actually a modestly-budgeted British movie, starring Hugh Bonneville.

He plays a journalist named Jed, who is having his own problems with his love life. He is about to interview a famous French film director named Thierry Grimandi (Cantona), who makes films about the vagaries of love. And though Jed, who watches a documentary about Grimandi’s films introduced by the great man himself, is dismissive of his musings on the subject of romance, he comes to wonder if there isn’t something to them.

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Looking For Eric and French Film have nothing in common except the presence of Cantona - yet it’s intriguing that he fulfils the same dramatic function in both of them. He represents some hidden truths - insights and wisdom denied to most men.

The trailer of Looking for Eric offers a glimpse of this. The postman Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) gazes at his bedroom poster of Cantona in a United shirt and murmurs: “Flawed genius, eh? Flawed postman.”

And when he comes face to face with his hero, he blurts out: "Sometimes I forget that you’re just a man.” The bearded Cantona regards him sternly: “I am not a man. I am Cantona,” holding his severe expression before breaking into a grin.

In French Film, Cantona (again bearded) is seen introducing the documentary about Thierry Grimandi’s films seated in a book-lined study, smoking and talking intensely. “My films are about love,” he shrugs, “its beginnings, its endings, its contracts, its tricks.”

His amusing turn establishes Grimandi as a satire of the popular notion of an archetypal French director, uttering banal comments about his work while making them sound profound. And we see an excerpt from one of his films, La Fin du Commencement (The End of the Beginning), which confirms our worst suspicions about him.

Not many footballers-turned-actors (Vinnie Jones comes to mind) could pull off characters with this level of charisma and a suggestion of mysteriously hidden depths. But of course Cantona played that role to the hilt at the peak of his career with Manchester United.

In interviews, he would offer observations in the form of bafflingly complex pronouncements, the most famous being his reflection on the obsessive media interest in him. “When the seagulls follow the trawler,” he said, “it’s because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea.” Nonsense it all may have been, but the thoughts of, say, Gary Neville or Paul Scholes could not compete in terms of entertainment.

In retrospect, it seemed as if Cantona was not just a footballer but a man who invented an enigmatic persona for himself, of which his famous sayings were merely a part.

There was often a touch of performance art about his appearances on the pitch. He glowered, he strutted, he swaggered, and he could switch between looking deeply uninterested and feverishly committed, sometimes in a matter of seconds.

Cantona first came to Britain for a trial with Sheffield Wednesday, before signing for Leeds United. (Yes, it was a long time ago.) He was a fringe member of the Leeds squad that won the league championship in 1991-92, the season before the Premiership was introduced.

But after a spectacular start with Leeds the following season (he scored two hat-tricks) he signed for Manchester United in the November and became an Old Trafford legend over 143 appearances in the next five seasons.

His penchant for getting into trouble merely burnished that legend. On his first return with United to Leeds’s ground, he spat at a fan who was heckling him and was fined £1,000. He was sent off four times in two seasons, and in 1995, playing at Crystal Palace, he was sent off for violent conduct, than aimed a kung-fu style kick at a home supporter who had insulting him with racist abuse.

It was no surprise that this fascinating, contradictory character turned to acting after announcing his retirement from full-time football at the age of 30.

He had a small role as the French ambassador Monsieur de Foix in the 1998 film Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett. He has appeared in several TV commercials, and half a dozen French films. Intriguingly he directed a short film of his own, Apporte-moi ton Amour (Bring Me Your Love), adapted from a story by the bohemian American novelist and poet Charles Bukowski.

Successful film careers have been launched on far shakier foundations than this, and while French Film is a decidedly minor work (Cantona is the best thing about it), Looking For Eric is a high-profile movie by an internationally acclaimed director - and appearing in Cannes will do Cantona no harm at all.

Ken Loach (a lifelong football fan who supports Bath City) is full of praise for Cantona’s ability in front of the camera: “He has natural projection, a natural warmth.”

If Cantona can summon up the charisma that instantly made him the most intriguing foreign footballer in the English game, he could be a name could conjure with on screen. Imagine the chants then: “Ooh-ah! He’s a star!"